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A Preliminary Model of Ikpana Intonational Phonology A preliminary model of Ikpana intonational phonology Hironori Katsuda 1 Introduction Ikpana is an endangered tone language spoken by approximately 7,500 people in south- eastern Ghana. It belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo family, and is also counted as one of the 15 Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages. Although its basic phonology and morphosyntax have been documented by Dorvlo (2008), little is known about its suprasegmental properties. Accordingly, this study proposes a preliminary model of the intonational phonology of Ikpana within the autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonational phonology (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986; Ladd, 1996/2008; Pierrehumbert, 1980), expanding empirical knowledge of intonation in African tone languages, and contributing to understanding of prosodic typology, especially with reference to intonationally-defined prosodic units (e.g., Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986; Jun; 1998; Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1988) and question prosody (Clements & Rialland, 2008; Rialland, 2007; 2009). 1.1 Intonation of African tone languages Tone languages manipulate F0 at the lexical level to distinguish words and certain grammatical functions. Furthermore, it is well established that tone languages, as well as non-tone languages, use F0 variation at the postlexical level to convey a certain pragmatic meaning and sentence type information (Ladd, 1996/2008). However, due to the high functional load of F0 at the lexical level, tone languages are assumed to have limited use of F0 at the postlexical level (Hyman & Monaka, 2011). The literature has explored how tone languages encode the information 1 that is typically expressed by postlexical F0 variation in non-tone languages without obscuring or changing lexical or grammatical meaning (e.g., Cruttenden, 1997; Hyman & Monaka, 2011; Yip, 2002). Intonation studies of African tone languages have attempted to distinguish a postlexical use of F0 variation from a lexical use. In her pioneering work, Lindau (1986) tested a formal model of the relation between tone and intonation in Hausa, a two-tone Chadic language spoken in Nigeria, by investigating sentences with different tone patterns in several sentence types. She found that the degree of downward F0 slope of an utterance varies depending on several factors, such as sentence type, sentence length, and tone pattern. For example, like-tone statements are characterized by a downward F0 slope, while like-tone questions (yes-no questions and wh- questions) are produced with zero slope. Furthermore, there are some intonational differences between yes-no questions and wh-questions: analyses of alternating tone sentences reveal that wh- questions are more susceptible to downdrift (i.e., an F0 lowering of a H tone after a L tone) than yes-no questions, and only yes-no questions are characterized by an F0 rise of an utterance-final H tone, which is sometimes followed by an F0 fall. Numerous studies that follow Lindau (1986) have also determined how African tone languages can use phrasal level F0 manipulation. In the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo family, the most well studied language in terms of intonation is probably Akan, which is a two-tone language spoken in Ghana and some eastern parts of the Ivory Coast. According to Genzel (2013) and Kügler (2017), simple statements in Akan are marked by a neutralization of the two lexical tones (H and L) in the sentence-final position, which is caused by final lowering of a H tone. Moreover, yes-no questions are marked by a variety of prosodic markers: L% boundary tone, 2 lengthening of sentence-final vowel, a higher intensity as well as breathy termination, and a raised pitch register. Wh-questions, however, exhibit only a pitch register raising as a prosodic marker. As shown in the cases of Hausa and Akan, intonation can interact with lexical tones in several ways. One of the central issues in intonation studies of African tone languages has been to typologize the ways intonation interacts with lexical tones. Hyman and Monaka (2011) suggest that languages with a complex tonal system may exhibit no boundary tones, and this seems to be consistent with the observations that Yoruba, a three-tone language (Connell & Ladd, 1990; Laniran, 1992), and Mambila, a four-tone language (Connell, 2017), do not use boundary tones. Hyman and Monaka propose three possible interaction patterns between lexical tones and boundary tones: ‘accommodation’, ‘submission’, and ‘avoidance’. In accommodation, both tone and intonation are realized but on different syllables, or intonation superimposes tone to give different pitch levels or pitch ranges. In submission, lexical tone is overridden by intonation, while in avoidance, intonation is minimized. As is true in both Hausa and Akan, African tone languages are also known to have diverse question prosody markers. Rialland (2007; 2009) (see also Clements & Rialland, 2008) investigated yes-no question markers of more than 70 African languages and found that almost half of them display some type of non-high-pitched markers (collectively referred to as ‘lax’ question prosody), as opposed to high-pitched markers (collectively referred to as ‘tense’ question prosody), which had hitherto been considered as (near-) universal (Bolinger, 1978; Ohala, 1984). The inventory of each category is listed as follows: (1) Lax yes-no question prosody a. final L tone or final intonation (L%) b. final lengthening 3 c. breathy termination d. [open] vowel (2) Tense yes-no question prosody a. cancellation/reduction of downdrift, register expansion b. raising of last H(s) (not necessarily sentence-final) c. cancellation/reduction of final lowering d. final H tone or rising intonation (H%) e. final HL melody A language generally employs more than one marker to characterize its question prosody, and some languages have more than one question prosody, each of which has its own combination of markers. Furthermore, it is possible for a language to use markers from both sets for its question prosody. This is called ‘hybrid’ question prosody and describes cases such as those in Akan: (a) L% boundary tone, (b) lengthening of sentence-final vowel, and (c) breathy termination in the lax prosody inventory (1), while (a) a raised pitch register in the tense prosody inventory (2). Crucially, the Kwa family, together with the Gur and Kru families, constitutes the ‘core’ area where lax prosody markers are used. Nine out of ten Kwa languages, including Ewe (Westerman, 1930) and Akan (Genzel, 2013; Kügler, 2017), use a L% boundary tone (or a final L tone) to mark a polar question. The only Kwa language that is not reported to show lax question prosody is Ga, in which (a) cancellation/reduction of downdrift, register expansion, and (c) cancellation/reduction of final lowering in the tense prosody inventory (2), are used to mark yes-no questions (Rialland, 2007). Other than languages included in Rialland’s database, Cahill (2015) reports that two Kwa languages, Adele and Chumburung, and three Gur languages, Buli, Deg, and Safaliba (all five languages are spoken in Ghana), all exhibit some sort of falling pitch in yes-no questions. However, 4 recent work by Essegbey (in press) reports that Tutrugbu (also known as Nyangbo), a Kwa language, exhibits a slight F0 rise at the end of yes-no questions. In fact, Tutrugbu is more closely related to Ikpana than other Kwa languages, since Tutrugbu is also counted as one of the GTM languages. This study extends our knowledge of possible prosodic structure in African tone languages, and prosodic typology more generally. More specifically, this study shows that Ikpana has a robust prosodic system with three levels of prosodic units, which is comparable to those of non-tone languages. This finding is consistent with the claim the intonational features of a language are not directly predictable from its lexical prosody (Jun, 2005). 1.2 The present study The aim of this study is to propose a preliminary model of the intonational phonology of Ikpana, a tone language spoken in south-eastern Ghana, expanding empirical knowledge of intonation in African tone languages, and contributing to understanding of prosodic typology. The theory of intonation adopted in this paper is the AM framework of intonational phonology (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986; Ladd, 1996/2008; Pierrehumbert, 1980). Although prosodic systems of African tone languages have often been analyzed using the so-called syntactic approach, such as the prosodic phonology or the indirect syntactic approach (Nespor & Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 1984; 1986), in which prosodic units are derived indirectly from the syntactic structure, adopting the AM framework has the following advantages. First, it allows for direct comparison with intonational systems that have different types of lexical prosody, such as lexical stress and lexical pitch accent (Jun, 2005; 2014). Second, it can capture the cases where prosodic phrasing cannot be determined purely based on the syntactic structure (e.g., Jun, 1998 on Korean accentual phrase). 5 There is a case in Ikpana where a prosodic unit, which I refer to as an intermediate phrase, does not correspond to the phonological phrase in the syntactic approach. For these reasons, I adopt the AM framework, in which prosodic units are intonationally defined based on the surface phonetic form of an utterance. The analyses presented in this paper suggest that Ikpana has a robust intonational system with three prosodic units, and that its intonation can be modeled in the same way as that of non-tone languages. The remainder of the present paper is structured as follows. A brief introduction to Ikpana, including the tonology of the language, will be presented in Section 2. Section 3 introduces a preliminary model of Ikpana intonational phonology based on declarative sentences. In Section 4, I will discuss the intonation of other sentence types―yes-no questions, wh-questions, and imperatives―and compare it with the intonation of declarative sentences. Finally, Section 5 summarizes the proposed model of Ikpana intonational phonology.
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